In 2015 I attended my high school reunion in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I graduated in 1965, so it was the 50th year since I had cap-and-gowned. One of the attendees was a graduate of a much later year, and gave a preview of a book he was writing about the historic high school we had all attended. Published in 2017, Jake Oresick’s “The Schenley Experiment: A Social History of Pittsburgh’s First Public High School” recaptures the spirit of my alma mater.
The neoclassical structure of Indiana limestone swallowed me in 1961 when I entered Schenley High, and as I mounted the marble stairs and traveled the terrazzo floors of the triangular halls, the weight of history rode lightly on my shoulders. Schenley was integrated in a time of segregation, as multi-ethnic as the University of Pittsburgh campus two miles away. Oresick’s history of Schenley, from its conception in 1855, to the people I met when I took my first tenuous high school steps into the future, include my first bride’s cousins, with whom I shared laughter, love and school days. But as his book wound down to the dances we did on the reunion floor that hot August night in 2015, he recounted an interview with Nevenka Kurjakovic, a Yugoslavian immigrant who sent seven children to the school. She noted the racial discord (at that time) in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, and wondered why Schenley did not have “the hate that other cities have.” Lamenting the closing, in 2008, of the school that was “designed for collaboration,” and that, even in its infancy, embraced the idea of inclusion and the recognition of the importance of a multi-cultural education, Kurjakovic wiped away tears and said, “We were gonna change the world.”
In 1985, a diverse collective of more than 40 artists that included Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nelson and the Jacksons, recorded a song written by Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson to “raise awareness of widespread, life-threatening poverty in Africa.” The song, “We Are The World” helped to raise more than $75 million for the non-profit USA for Africa to “fight poverty on the continent.” The recording artists proved that we are all, indeed, “the world.” We at Schenley may not have realized our impact on our world, but I believe that we altered the arc of time and circumstance, that we imbedded into each other a sweet, soft thistle of graceful human companionship and a joy in the presence of the other. Our peaceful co-existence flew in the face of the popular narrative that said that we should not co-mingle. Our refusal to accept that premise had an effect on the way in which we lived our lives, how we taught our children, and to whom we gave our love. We were the teenagers of a better future.
On March 14th, the students of Shortridge High School, ignoring bitter cold, peacefully joined a nationwide walk-out to call attention to the 17 deaths by gunfire in Parkland, Florida. Lori Armstrong, Parent Involvement Educator and Student Government Advisor, introduced me to Madeline Anderson, the president of student government at Shortridge, who carried a sign with the names of the Parkland dead, and circled the athletic field with hundreds of other students, quietly passing the school’s approving principal, Shane O’Day. On March 24th, another nationwide gathering of students is scheduled for Washington, D.C. Some of those students’ voices will be the ones we first heard when smoke from automatic weapons fire might have still been wafting from their clothes. They will ask, again, why they cannot be safe in their schools, and why there cannot be a civilized conversation about solutions.
Nevenka, we did change the world, and we had children who had children, and those children marched on Tallahassee, Florida, in Indianapolis, Indiana and are headed to Washington, D.C., demanding answers and insisting that they will die, “Never Again.”